• We’re not sure yet what we’re going to do in terms of the pictures, this blog, etc  for the longer team — they were originally intended just for the trip, but we may keep them around in some form or another.
• Austin’s birthday is June 23rd.
• Yes – we have more pictures and some videos from the trip as well as the post trip pictures;  it’s been a busy few weeks and I haven’t been able to get to this, but I am hoping in the next 4-5 days to get these up. The original ones are still up at http://www.enmesh.net/china
• Guides – There are portions of china that are fairly restricted in terms of having permission to go there (think Tibet), but I do not believe they are required even there, once you have permission to go. That said, if you don’t know Chinese (we don’t), and are not schooled in the total chaos school of driving (no, New York does not even come remotely close), you may want to think about drivers/guides.  I don’t think they are necessary in all cases — in the larger cities there are subways, etc that are pretty navigatable for most anyone, but we did not have time to venture too far in Beijing and had Austin in Guangzhou.. so we were a little limited there.
• We don’t know anything about Austin’s story before he made it into the Orphanage. It is not legal to abandon children — that obviously doesn’t stop it from happening, but it does tend to discourage people from being public about it. Mostly, people leave them where they know they will be found (a public park, near a government building, etc)  We know more about his time after he was abandoned. Some of that we are keeping for him to know and decide if wants to share after he gets older, but the short version is that he was moved from the Orphanage to True Children’s Home, an organization that helps to provide care for correctable conditions with the goal of moving those children closer to adoption. After his surgery, he spent some additional time at True Children’s Home, and then moved to a foster family for around 6 months before he came to us.
• The food was good – everything from westernized Chinese food to Thai, to Italian, German, Subways and Starbucks (If I recall correctly, I believe Starbucks completed it’s invasion of every corner on the planet around two years ago) We ate a ton of buffet breakfasts at The White Swan hotel, where we spent our time in Guangzhou (they were included in the pricetag), and got a great authentic Chinese meal in Beijing on the advice of our guide and driver.  A couple of the members of our group will no doubt take issue with at least one of the meals (I didn’t like the German restaurant, everyone got food or water based intestinal issues at some point in the trip, etc) — but overall, I think we ate very well.

Again, sorry for the lack of good update posts — we are pretty much exhausted all the time. I’m told this will not actually stop, and we should expect to be exhausted until they are both past the age of 30, but I’m hoping that the exhaustion will at least become routine enough for us to start seeing some of you again and updating things like pictures, etc.

But now, I’m going to sleep!

I did have an unlocked GSM phone with me, but we never felt the need to get a SIM for it since we were together as a group almost the entire time. For the Guangzhou portion of the trip we had a rented phone from Pandaphone for my parents in case they wanted to wander off on their own for a while — they didn’t. I don’t think we even used the minimum spend Pandaphone required.

My parents brought a netbook with us that they had purchased to take on a previous trip to Italy (an Asus unit, if you are keeping score). It was great for battery life and for weight/size, but the keyboard was tiny.. hurts my hands to type on it!) It was great to have something to check email, calls, news, and of course update this blog.. but I think next time I would try to have a lightweight laptop with me. It wasn’t in the budget this time around, but maybe the next trip. Of course, I am a technology addict so the need may differ for you – but I think all the members of our party liked being able to call, video chat, email, etc. Most of the programs we brought were on a portable harddrive or a SD card and were “portable” versions.

Most of our communication back to the states was via internet (of course) – including most of the phone calls  (VOIP or Skype). If we did not have the netbook with us, the cell phone would probably have been the primary line home. We were able to use VOIP for voice calls (xten’s client, several different providers, but voip.ms was our primary), and video chat via Skype.

About that internet…

Yes, the Great Firewall of China does exist and when you add hotel internet on top of that..  you are not in the best position. My experience with the hotel internet connections are that they are horrible and drop-prone. True, that’s the case most everywhere, but this was worse than normal I think. Is this the case everywhere in China? I don’t know – but for the 4 hotels we used, it was. But it DID work.  Most the hotels we were in charged around $40 USD for a week.. not much less for a single day. And of course, a great many sites (including wordpress) were blocked – most by China’s firewall system.

So how did we  update the blog, you ask? Or maybe you didn’t, but you just can’t stop reading? Either way, we did it with a simple http proxy (squid) running on a linux box back at our house. Although squid can be set up to require a user/password or to be open to everyone (boo!), we used it through a SSH session tunnel. This basically passed all our blocked traffic through a machine at my house across an encrypted tunnel. This did add a little slow-down, but it allowed us to make it to blocked sites like wordpress. And plus, the hotel connections were slow  anyways, so I don’t think it really hurt. I had also set up and testing steps to install and activate an open squid proxy on temporary hosts on Amazon EC2 and Rackspace. This worked flawlessly and was my backup if the path to my home machine was blocked, my home machine died, or the slow-down introduced by my home cable service proved to be too much. If you would like the specifics on any of these, I am happy to provide them!

Yes, there are some easier ways to post to wordpress (email posting, etc), but I wanted to ability to draft posts, insert pictures where we wanted them, etc.  Wordpress is great, and was very easy to use once you do a few posts, but I think if we were to do it again (a trip, not an adoption – we’re done.. no outnumbering the parents..) I would stick with a simpler static site with some basic blog type functions.. nothing fancy.

For the picture albums, I used JAlbum to build them and just uploaded them to one of my web hosts via SFTP (in this case, at Nearly Free Speech). We would take the video and pictures, move them on to a portable USB drive (freeing up space for the next day’s pictures), make albums, and then upload them.  I also pushed a copy of the all the pictures and video to my Amazon S3 account for safekeeping unless something got lost/stolen along the way.

After a very long and absurdly hot flight, we made it to New York, sailed through immigration and customs and then split up (my parents were taking a later flight to Jacksonville, we were taking an earlier one to Orlando.) We were met by family (grandparents, aunts/uncles, and cousins) at the airport which was great!

We will likely be off the wire for a day or so while we adjust to the time difference, unpack, get Austin used to the new house, and generally collapse.

Thanks everyone for your understanding, interest, questions, and thoughts!

Depending on how entertaining the fight becomes, we hope to be able to write up some of our thoughts on the earlier part of the trip (Beijing) and to answer some of the logistical questions that we have been asked that were difficult to answer before.  Now for a few quick hours of sleep before we have to get moving again..

After we got in, we took the safari ride – this is similar to the ride at Animal Kingdom except it was much longer and had many more animals. Also, it was all in Chinese, so we have no idea what the driver was saying. Although, come to think of it, I’ve had drivers at Animal Kingdom that I couldn’t understand a single word of either. I think both Liligrace and Austin enjoyed it.

Next we walked through a baby animal area – this was very exciting for a number of reasons. First, because there were baby tigers inches away from y0u. Secondly, because there were baby tigers inches away from you. And what I mean by that is, there were no staff in the area and you could literally reach into the little holding areas and touch them or maybe be mauled by them.

Sure, they look cute until the leap up and maul you.

It added to the excitement factor though the kids did not seem to notice. The real fun was at the end though where Liligrace got her first big surprise – she got to hold and feed a baby tiger. And it didn’t even bite her. No, I am not kidding. About either thing. I mean look, would she be smiling it if bit her? I suspect not.

We wandered around, saw a lot of animals, and saw lots and lots of Pandas (the park apparently has 10 because they took on 5 from another park that was damaged in a recent earthquake.)  Then we took a break, ate our lunch (it had been suggested that we smuggle.. er… I mean bring our own in..) We ate next to a flying dino ride (al a Dumbo) that looks to have been made by the same company that put together Dumbo/Flying Carpets/Flying Dinos at Disney.) Of course, that needed to be ridden as well.

Then Liligrace got another surprise… a (long) ride on an elephant. She rode by herself (well, with the elephant handler) and was very, very brave. I was too scared to go myself, but she looks pretty happy:

Look at me, I'm on an Elephant.

The guy took her around inside the elephant enclosure, they fed a baby elephant, and then she rode out into the park a little bit. We also have a picture of the driver guy yelling at some kids to get out of the way so that they don’t get squashed. This is the sort of crazy fun that you can have when lawyers are not involved (sorry lawyer friends.)

This was very exhausting as you might imagine (Austin just couldn’t take it anymore), but there were Giraffe that needed feeding:

Yes, I know it's sideways. Sorry. Tilt your head.

With the giraffe fed, it was time for an ice cream treat (for the humans) and to meet up with our driver for the return trip to our hotel. There was a lot more to do (the white tiger exhibit was being reworked to open in time for the 2010 Asia games) — maybe next time!

I will leave you with this picture of a Panda eating bamboo:

And of the helpful sign  posted to remind you that the Panda can mess you up:

]]> http://chinaaustin.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/big-sisters-adventure/feed/ 5 bwern P1100458 P1100475 P1100476 P1100543 P1100564 P1100632 P1100622 P1100510 P1100485 http://chinaaustin.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/a-big-step/ http://chinaaustin.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/a-big-step/#comments Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:58:40 +0000 Ben http://chinaaustin.wordpress.com/?p=66 ]]> Today we got on a bus with several other families and drove into downtown Guangzhou.  Once there, we filed in, sat for a bit, took an oath, and shuffled back out.  It may not have been flashy, but that was the process for getting Austin a visa to enter the US (well, that and about 50 metric tons of paperwork before we left the US.) That visa will also bring him US citizenship once we enter the US.. so it’s no small thing. We should get the actual visa and his passport back Friday, in time for us to leave Saturday night.

Between now and then then we have a million things we’d like to try to get done.  Since the bulk of the adoption process is done (pretty much just collecting our documents at this point) we can scurry about and try to make use of our remaining time to have a little fun.

I have been  very surprised at the number of people who are reading our little blog and how many questions people have had; there are a couple topics I will tackle after we return to the US for various reasons, but if you have any questions, please do let us know!

TCH has two apartment like units in a very nice building.  They currently have 23 babies plus two in the  hospital.  The place was immaculately clean and each baby had their own crib, with only 3 – 4 cribs per room.  Also, each daytime caregiver only has 2 babies to care for and the nighttime nannies take care of 3.  They rely on donations and corporate support.

After touring TCH, Jenny, the director, took us  across the street to meet Austin’s foster parents.  He lived with them for 6 months.  They were as excited to meet us as we were them and brought us a stack of pictures.  They recognized Liligrace from  the pictures we had sent and immediately foster dad pinched her cheeks.  They have three grown children and it was clear that they all loved Austin who was their first foster child.  They told us some things we had already figured out about Austin – he is strong, very smart and not picky about his food.  He likes to eat!  They were also very concerned that he get a good education and hoped we would send updates.  We are so grateful that Austin was so well cared for over  the past year between TCH and the foster family (which was also coordinated by TCH).  It was a quick visit but we promised to come back in a few years and they assured us we were welcome in their home anytime.

On our way back from Dongguan – about a 90 minute drive from our hotel – we made our second visit to Carrefours, which is similar to a Wal-Mart in some ways.  Except this  store is 4 floors built entirely underground and you take your shopping cart up and down flat escalators.  We may need to go back – we discovered that baby wipes are 5 RMB at Carrefours and 26 RMB here on the island.

Still hoping to visit the safari park and see the pandas – Liligrace is really looking forward to this – but a change in our consulate appointment has us trying to reschedule the safari park for another day.

Thank you to everyone for your comments, prayers and good wishes.   Computer time is limited since we are spending most of our time keeping up with a climbing toddler, so I’m sorry I haven’t replied to anyone individually.

A bunch of new pictures have been put up (http://www.enmesh.net/china)

Post-Beijing, the bulk of our trip is being spent in Guangzhou — or really Shamian Island (which is more of a sand bar, but I guess Shamian Sand Bar just doesn’t have the same ring.) Wikipedia didn’t lie; this was the primary point of foreign trade for China until the end of the Opium war, and the buildings all reflect it (read: English Colonial).

There are what feels like 200 bride/groom combos taking pictures at most corners – I’m not sure why it strikes me as weird, but apparently the buildings are the draw. The island itself is very small – you can walk from one end to the other in 10-15 minutes. Less if you’re not slow and lazy like I am. There are several hotels,  several big restaurants - we’ve hit Lucy’s, an Italian place, a German place, a Chinese place and a Thai place) as well as a couple of smaller places and a surprise Starbucks treat (holy crap, they really are everywhere.)

We are staying in the White Swan – something of a rite of passage for a lot of adopting families. The hotel is very used to having newly adopting families and the staff is very good / patient. Unfortunately, the beds are the same as most of the rest of China – essentially bricks. Eileen desperately wishes we had packed inflatable mattresses to put on top. But there is a huge breakfast buffet every morning that is included in the room rate, so there is that.

Some people have asked me why we are spending so much time here vs traveling more – the answer is mostly because of the remaining US paperwork, although our stay is a little longer than most. Usually, you spend a few days in Beijing to get oriented, sightsee, etc – then you go to the province where your child is waiting for around a week (processing the paperwork for your adoption and the child’s Chinese passport) — at this point your adoption is finalized..  and you would fly to Guangzhou, where you are doing US paperwork to get an immigrant visa — your adoption was already finalized, but he’s not a US citizen yet, so he will need a visa to enter the US (he becomes a citizen once he enters the USA.)

So why are we here so long? Because just like with Liligrace, Austin is in Guangzhou — no separate province to travel to..

Austin is doing great, y0u can see him adjusting more and more each day (though there will no doubt be some rough days ahead.) He does NOT like sitting still, staying in the room, etc. If we are in the hall or near the elevators and Eileen comes out to join us he goes running full speed toward her with a lot of happy laughter – so that’s probably a good sign. Liligrace is still having some trouble adjusting to being in the universe vs being at the center of the universe, but I think that is to be expected! I’m grateful that we have my parents along to help us wrangle as the two of them melting down at once  is something we are not yet used to (though I’m sure its familiar enough to anyone with more than one child!)

Tomorrow looks to be a very busy (and early) day so I will try to write more and update some pictures and video (gasp!) tomorrow.  5 more days until we head back..

Anyway – the pictures can be seen at http://www.enmesh.net/china – I recommend full screen mode.  I’ve started with our time in Beijing, but will add the all important Austin Gotcha day photos tomorrow (that’s overnight for you in the USA.)

Our second day with Austin has gone very well; we took it easy today in terms of roaming around and stayed in the hotel most of the day. But we did have two appointments – one to finalize the adoption with China’s government (done!), and one to get a picture for Austin’s US visa application – took about 45 seconds)

The rest of the trip is pretty much USA related process and paperwork (and maybe some sightseeing.) Amazing (but not really surprising) that we finished the Chinese portion in three days and that the US portion will take a week.

Austin did great today, more comfortable but as we expected it is clear that it is going to take a long time for him to handle the loss of his foster family. He has been spoiled rotten by the foster family and is used to getting what he wants when he wants it. We are taking it easy for now of course, but that’s going to be fun to adjust..

He is also very, very, very loud – on multiple frequencies and possibly even different dimensions. The only times he has really been quiet are when he is sleeping and when he is eating — and since there is only so much of that which can be expected on the return flight, I am not looking forward to the frustration from our fellow passengers (which will no doubt be well earned.) But that is another problem for another week..